It’s sort of the new “demo disc” though here a potential buyer gets to experience the whole game if the streamer chooses to stream it all. There’s no denying that Streamers are a fantastic and cheap (unless you’re paying them for promotion) way to get your game on hundreds to thousands of eyes. Tickets and more details about the show can be found here, and information on the NFSA’s mission to archive Australian games can be read below. That’s a niche inside of a niche, but it still amounted to millions of players.”īennett Foddy’s Getting Over It is part of the Game Masters exhibition at the National Film and Sound Archives, which runs until March 9. “In the case of Getting Over It, the perfect audience turned out to be people who watch streamers play games for entertainment, and who play games on PC with a mouse. “It’s true that the culture is fragmented, but I feel like a lot of the separate subcultures and platforms are each as large as the entire industry was in the 1980s, so you can pick the perfect venue for your game idea and really tune it to match the audience and hardware,” he said. ![]() While the decentralised nature of how gamers connect makes it even harder for smaller titles to break through the noise of everything, the overall gaming industry is now so large that every platform and subculture is large enough in and of itself that you can find success by targeting just one of those. How those conversations happen and where they happen has fragmented into a million different pieces across the internet, from Twitch chat to Twitter to Facebook groups to Discord channels, official forums, Steam friends and more.įoddy, however, took a longer view of the change. The preservation of niche titles, then, is inextricably tied to how we talk about those games, as the media, creators, individuals and communities. “Australia punches well above its weight in games, culturally and economically, and that work absolutely deserves to be preserved.” “If I can strike a parochial note for a moment – as an Australian and as a game designer – the economic output of Australian game designers now dwarfs that of Australian musicians and filmmakers,” he said. ![]() In his view, while Australia has never had a huge game industry, the efforts of local creators now surpasses the local music and film industry. I asked Foddy what he thought about the NFSA’s mission, and he said it was important for countries and creators outside of the United States and Japan. That’s a niche inside of a niche, but it still amounted to millions of players.” “The perfect audience turned out to be people who watch streamers play games for entertainment, and who play games on PC with a mouse. Foddy’s been interested in the archival for a while – he’s spoken about teaching American students more about the history of European and English games, and in 2014 his keynote talk to Indiecade East focused on the history of indies, touching on the tools and mods developers used to become developers. We were chatting because Getting Over It is one of the newer games being exhibited at Game Masters, an exhibition at the National Film and Sound Archives (NFSA) that runs until March 9. “I think the only way to deal with that is to respond as though each of those interactions is coming from a playful, positive place.”įoddy, who originally left Australia for a job as a philosopher focusing on drug addiction, also works as an instructor for the NYU Game Center. There’s still a degree of genuine outrage, of course, and Foddy can’t always determine the difference between someone having a go and a gamer who’s taking the piss. “Last year there was an alarming trend of consolidation, when streamers went from playing a wide range of games to just playing Fortnite or Overwatch and a handful of other games,” Foddy said. That doesn’t necessarily mean Getting Over It never received coverage, but it does highlight a quirk in the legacy of broad-based media, and a transition towards niche content and creators servicing niches within that. ![]() He’s a developer whose success has primarily been viral, and yet, the nature of that success didn’t translate to reviews. The change in media discourse and the gaming landscape is a running theme through my email chat with Foddy, maker of Getting Over It and the web hit QWOP. And partially because of that, it’s why Foddy believes YouTubers and streamers are the future for driving the discourse around niche, indie titles. But lo and behold, one of the biggest indie games of the last few years has basically never been reviewed. Bennett Foddy’s Getting Over It became an internet sensation, so when the Australian designer tells me the game has just one review on Metacritic, I’m stunned.
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